the future of power looks like an endless series of amusing cat videos, a universe cleverly edited by profiling, machine learning, targeting and augmented reality, fashioning a particular world view in which we will all comfortably rest”. Forget the boot, stamping on the face of the opppressed – Facebook will bring our slippers and pipes so we can sit comfortably by the fire, with no desire the challenge the authoritarian orthodoxies of our rulers.

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m spending it in Casole d’Elsa, a small town not too from Florence and remembering a December thirty years ago when I brought my mum to Florence for Christmas as she’d always wanted to visit but her limited mobility – she needed a wheelchair for all but the shortest trip – had made it harder for her to get around.

It occurs to me only now that she was the age I am now – 57 – but in my memories of the time she is older and more infirm. Her choices in life had been so severely limited that it is perhaps unsurprising I see her that way – by her late fifties she had few opportunities open to her.

So we went to Florence for a week on a package holiday, staying in a small hotel near Santa Maria Novella and enjoying the city, the culture and the people. We managed to get up the stairs to the Uffizi, and I wheeled her along the Arno and across the Ponte Vecchio.

This is of minority interest, but if I put it here it becomes findable…

There is a bank of ticket machines at Cambridge rail station and they will sell you tickets. Some tickets. If you have a Network Railcard (valid after 1000) and you buy a ticket to London at 0945 the machine lets you select your ticket and click Add Railcard but it won’t let you select Network Railcard because it’s ‘not valid at this time’. Except it will be valid when you get on the train, which you are about to do. Someone, somewhere, has hard coded this logic and it’s annoying especially if you’ve got to the station early to avoid the queue.

However today Maria, who is a station marshall, showed me a workaround. If you select ‘travel in future’ you can select TODAY as the future day you’re going to travel on and give it a train time AFTER 1000. Then when you’ve selected your ticket it will offer the Network Railcard option.

At the closing party for the 2017 Encounters Film Festival in Bristol, Catherine Allen and I discussed Second Date, Nairobi Berries and Blind Vaysha, all screened as part of the Immersive Encounters strand.

I gave this talk to the SCONUL Conference, in Gateshead, June 7 2017. Sconul is the Society of College, National and University Libraries.

This was what I intended to say, and roughly what I did say.

To Begin…

The cat is alive

The cat is dead

This is a time of superposition of wave states because tomorrow many of us vote – some may already have voted, like I have – in the most important UK General Election since 1945.

The act of observation will be important. And we speak before it.

So we won’t know if the cat is alive or dead until many, many boxes are opened – ballot boxes and boxes of postal votes around the country..

We do not know which world awaits us.

I will not be partisan. But my talk is written in the light of a possible future for your libraries and for the idea of a library that is predicated on enlightenment values, scholarship, humanism and humanity; an open, liberal, inclusive society that values every citizen and appreciates that we are all connected and interdependent, which embraces diversity and differences of all types – including philosophy and business model; and which is confident in itself – confident enough to be able to address the major challenges that face the biosphere as weather systems change, and that face the species as the food web shifts and comes close to collapse.

Each of you will have your own view of how that future can be delivered. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Tom Shakespeare’s recent BBC Radio 4 essay about stories, and the need to drive policy through stories that work, stories that are based on facts and can be used as the basis of compelling narratives, resonated with something I’ve been thinking about recently so here are my ramblings. They also owe a lot to the Dark Mountain project, which has been increasingly shaping my waking and sleeping thoughts.

Art eats politics for breakfast.

The ideas from which we build our politics have to come from somewhere.

They come from

our parents

our family

our teachers

the social groups we inhabit or create

They come from the stories we are told

Both those that are true

And those that are made up but speak to truth

Today, as always, there are competing narratives. In some we are humane, and love. In others we tear things apart in fear.

Our goal is to tell the stories of the thing we want to be true, of the things we want to form the basis of our politics and thereby create the imaginative space needed for others to decide to build the world we envisage, a world in which the things we say are true are made true and the things we say are not true are not made true.

To make something (true), first make it imaginable.

We need to feed the dreams of the next generation of citizens, politicians, parents and storytellers. And we need to tell stories that can be retold from generation to generation.

Because the ways we tell stories change and old stories must be told in new ways

Because the details of the old stories become familiar, even if the message needs to be transmitted

Because the sets used to wobble and the makeup was obvious and the actors would ham it up.

Because the faces of the storytellers are no longer famous or familiar or exciting.

And because each generation grows in the shadow of another and the way the light falls changes.

Because each generation wishes to cast its own shadow.

Civilisation will never be finished, and the thought that there is ‘progress’ is a story that we should be trying to untell. What we have built will always decay, whether a temple or an idea, and it will need to be rebuilt, reaffirmend and revised. This is normal. This is to be expected. This is the real world.

If we want to retain a memory across the institutional generations we can embed it into practice so deeply that those carrying it out are not even aware of the story they are telling, or we can hide it in stories that they will want to retell.

And because there will be times when it is important to know where the story came from and what it used to say, we need to retain, somewhere, enough to reconstruct its history and origins.

When the journalist Joan Didion wrote ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ (in The White Album, 1979) she was expressing a deep truth about how we construct meaning in our lives. Now we need to find stories that will help us thrive.

For the last three years I’ve held a seminar for the students on the ‘Experience’ Module of the MA Arts & Cultural Management at King’s College London, where we consider the development and likely future of digital media and how cultural managers can encompass the new possibilities in their practice.

The session is an attempt to look at the technology that’s out there and help students think about how you can thrive when everything seems digital, and how you can do this in a way that keeps the art and culture at the heart of your activities and planning.

I thought it might be useful to publish it here.

To Begin

If the world was simpler I’d be able to see a straight line and point you there, but there’s no hope of that. Things change in unexpected ways and the future is more like a superposition of wave states that will collapse into an experienced reality as we live through it.

So let’s begin by acknowledging that the revolution happened a while ago, while the attention of most people was elsewhere. We live in its aftermath. Let’s be inspired instead by the tropes of design fiction: “what role could we have in a world where…”

It’s ten years to the day since Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and defined the shape of the portable networked computers that now dominate our lives and act as the portal between real and virtual worlds for so many of us.

I remember it well, mostly because I didn’t see that the touchscreen was a beautifully usable interface. I even said as much on the BBC News website, back when I had a weekly column:

Having used a smartphone with a touchscreen for over a year, I can testify to the sheer irritation of having “keys” that offer no tactile feedback when you touch them and of trying to use a handheld device that forces you to stare closely at the screen whenever you’re trying to do call a number or send a text.

Touch screens work well for larger devices or fixed displays, but I’m back with a proper number pad now and loving it. I suspect that many iPhone users will do the same.

I even managed to get myself completely roasted by Fake Steve Jobs, who pointed out my arrogance and that he ‘had no idea who you were or that you went to Brasenose-upon-Oxford-in-Cambridge’ (OK, it’s not exactly a badge of honour but does show I was being read and listened to at the time).

What I failed to see at the time was the thing that is most obvious now: the iPhone wasn’t a telephone, it was a computer. And – until the advent of Echo and Google Home- we look at our computers when we use them. I was thinking about texting, not interacting.

Ah well. It’s good to remember when you got it wrong- and ask yourself every day whether you’re about to say something foolish about the next big breakthrough.

PS you can get your own copy of Reflection, which runs on a variety of ‘computers’ on the App Store. And you should.

Sort of. After a ceremony today at Anglia Ruskin University’s Chelmsford campus I how have an Honorary Doctorate of Arts, which is a very fine thing. You can read the citation over on the ARU website. It’s very sweet.

Speaking at ARU

I was asked to address those who were graduating today after actually doing some work and passing some exams. This is what I said (mostly).

Vice Chancellor, honoured guests and students

I’ve lived in Cambridge for over thirty-five years, and Anglia Ruskin University has played a significant part in my life. I’m old enough to remember the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology and the Anglia Polytechnic days – I don’t go back quite as far as the foundation of the School of Art, but it’s not *that* far before my time!